Christmas in July

[See “Eastwoodian Aftermaths,” The American Spectator, February, 2007 under “Articles”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Bad jokes are like rotten apples: it only takes a few of them to spoil the whole barrel. Company Man, a co-written, co-directed effort by Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, starts off very promisingly. Its jokes are crisp and tart and juicy. But not long into it we take our first bite of the rotten…

I tried very hard to like Henry Fool by Hal Hartley and was intermittently successful, but I found it in the end unsatisfying. The film tells the story of two friends, the rogue Henry Fool (“there used to be an ‘e’ on the end of it in the 17th century, but it dropped off”), played…

[See discussion under “My Diary” of June 25, 2014] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

The puzzling thing about Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Limey, is the very thing he puts to the fore in it, namely the national origin of its central character. What has that got to do with the basic story of an ex-con who’s “not from around here” pursuing the man he believes to be his…

A thoughtful and very watchable film whose performance does not quite match its ambition